Coaches Toolbox

Leading a Group Through Losing

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Leading a Group Through Losing
Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs ( Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

My experiences in high school, college, and career have always revolved around athletics. As a result, my days almost always end with the stress of competition. There is a 50/50 chance that I will go home every evening dejected from a loss or exhilarated from a win. Even as an athletic administrator, this remains true as I feel many of these emotions on behalf of my coaches. This provides daily case studies on leadership that are crystal clear. The scoreboard has a way of making life pretty black and white. I have found that losing and struggle is where great leadership is most often demonstrated. Teams don’t really need their leader when it is going well. Teams are desperate for a leader when it is going poorly. I think this has a very easy application to teams of all kinds and losing of all kinds. Businesses, churches, non-profit organizations, and families will all experience the stress of losing. Here are 4 simple ways to lead well when it feels like you and your team are losing…

Be hopeful that better days are coming because they are. I am not talking about a faked, contrived, naïve insanity. I’m talking about a hope that comes from a commitment to keep pursuing mission and adapting plans that will yield better days. Along the journey, there will be bad days AND good days. Leaders find a way to look through the bad days knowing that good days will come back around. Remind your team of the mission, communicate changes to the plan to make the mission, and reassure them better days are coming…with a big smile on your face.

Bring the most energy when there is a lack of energy. In an athletic team setting, there are two people that have to be high energy every day: the head coach and the best player. If those two people are high energy, the group is likely to reach its fullest potential and pull through losing streaks.

The more people on your team, the more empowered they need to be by trust and loyalty. Insecurity flares fast when losing shows up. Teammates start pointing fingers, and stop communicating with each other. The leader should express belief in the abilities of the people that they are serving both privately and corporately.

Demonstrate determination to push through the losing streak. Losing makes you question whether or not the pursuit is worth it. With those questions comes the temptation to cut corners. Evaluate what you would do and how long you would do it if you were winning. You

Should do the exact same thing when you are losing. The people you lead are looking for either a reason to give in or an inspiration to keep going. The leader will be one or the other.

I want to close with an excerpt of a letter written by General George Marshall to another general. The letter is written more than two decades before General Marshall became famous for his leadership during World War II and was named Secretary of Defense under President Truman. It demonstrates General Marshall’s belief in how to lead when it appears the team is losing…

November 5, 1920
General John S. Mallory
15 University PlaceLexington, Virginia

My Dear General Mallory,
Last summer during one of our delightful rides I commented on the advice I would give a young officer going to war, based on my observation of what had constituted the success of the outstanding figures in the American Expeditionary Forces, and you asked me to write out what I had said. A discussion with Fox Conner this morning reminded me of my promise to do this, so here it is.

To be a highly successful leader in war four things are essential, assuming that you possess good common sense, have studied your profession and are physically strong.

When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic.

When evening comes and all are exhausted, hungry and possibly dispirited, particularly in unfavorable weather at the end of a march or in battle, you must put aside any thought of personal fatigue and display marked energy in looking after the comfort of your organization, inspecting your lines and preparing for tomorrow.

Make a point of extreme loyalty, in thought and deed, to your chiefs personally; and in your efforts to carry out their plans or policies, the less you approve the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.
The more alarming and disquieting the reports received or the conditions viewed in battle, the more determined must be your attitude.

Never ask for the relief of your unit and never hesitate to attack.
I’m certain in the belief that the average man who scrupulously follows this course of action is bound to win great success. Few seemed equal to it in this war, but I believe this was due to their failure to realize the importance of so governing their course.

Faithfully yours,

George C. Marshall

Major, General Staff Aide-de-Camp

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teenage children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.


Trying or Training: Predicting your own progress and potential

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Trying or Training: Predicting your own progress and potential
Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs ( Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

Imagine if a friend invited you to play in a dodgeball tournament at the local gym this weekend. For those of you that love the rush of competition and the thrill of whipping an object at total strangers, you’d be all in. You’d show up this weekend, stretch out a little bit, shake hands with your temporary teammates, and go at it. There’s not a doubt in my mind that you would try very hard to destroy others and avoid getting destroyed.

Now image with me if a member of the U.S. Olympic committee showed up at your front door and identified you as the most likely candidate to win the gold medal at the Olympics in the triathlon but in order to tap into your hidden potential, you must start 7-day per week training immediately!

In the dodgeball tournament, you would try very hard and in the triathlon story you would train very hard. Trying and training are two very different things that if we take a moment and think about, I think we’d be more successful in accomplishing important things in our lives.

Try: a short term event requiring maximum effort. The results of trying are usually short-lived and have very little return on your investment.
Train: a preparation for a pre-determined goal that requires regular and sustainable effort. The results usually have a lot of redeeming value and there is a plan in place for how to handle frustration. You simply return to your frustration.

There are lots of things in life that require a good ‘ol fashioned try. You give it your best. However, there are really important things in life that we try too hard and don’t train enough for. What are some of those things? I would put important roles you hold in your life at the top of this list. What would it look like to train to be a better parent, spouse, value-adder at work, or a Christ-follower? Here’s my suggestions…

Reserve a short period of time everyday for your training. For me, this is in the quiet hours of the morning. For night owls, it may be after everyone in your house has gone to bed. For others, they may have flexibility during their lunch break. Early in your training, make it short so that it is sustainable. 10 minutes, added up over 30 days, is a lot of time spent training. As your commitment grows and results begin to show up, adding time will take place naturally.

Track your training. I’ve heard it said that if you aren’t tracking progress, you aren’t making progress. Find a way to track what you’ve done. Journaling, notes on your smart phone, crossing off days on a calendar. Seeing the compilation of your training efforts can inspire you to keep going.

Pick a source for your training. Books, podcasts, websites, blogs, or scheduled phone calls with someone that has made progress in the area you are training for are all sources of training. My son is an avid championship level distance runner. He has recently discovered that reading books about running is a great source of training for him.


Share your training experiences with others. I have found that talking about what I’m training for with others creates a lot of energy. Often, it’s because I find that the person I’m talking to has had or is having a similar experience and that inspires me to keep going.

At different points in my life, I have been frustrated with the outcome of a situation in which I was trying very hard. However, I have found that I deal with frustration in a lot healthier way when it is in an area that I’m training for. I simply return to my training and keep moving forward.

Trying is great for dodging a ball thrown at your head. Training is much more valuable when trying to unlock your potential…even if you’ll never be an Olympic triathlete.

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teenage children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.


The Formula for High Performance Team Building

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THE FORMULA FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAM BUILDING

Dr. Cory Dobbs
The Academy for Sport Leadership

“Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will care.” -Your Student-Athlete

Here’s a simple formula that should provide you a clear way to grasp high performance in the area of team leadership. High involvement plus high commitment equals high performance.

So, what does all this mean for you? Well, high involvement means you need to nurture the involvement of every team member. Did you get that—every team member. Each and every team member needs to engage with the leadership development process by bringing a high level of energy and focus. Only when you have high involvement can you entertain the idea of high commitment. Simply put, if you don’t have high involvement you can’t have high commitment, and if you don’t have high commitment you’ll never see high performance.


If you select only a few team captains you’ve willingly and knowingly chosen low involvement. Those student-athletes not selected to develop as leaders will not care much about the process of leadership development of their peers. They’ll clearly say by actions and non-actions, “Why bother, there’s nothing in it for me.” You’ve chosen not to get them directly involved and commitment comes from being involved.

Those student-athletes you’ve chosen as team leaders might show high commitment to leadership and leadership development. Why not, it benefits them. But you are still left with the reality that you don’t—and logically can’t have—high involvement with only a few chosen participants. Thus, you’ll never achieve high commitment nor high performance.

However, if you choose to involve everyone on the team—a leader in every locker—you have a chance to attain high commitment. By placing leadership practice and opportunities in the hands of every team member, you involve everyone. And depending on the quality of programmatic development you have a chance at achieving high commitment. Ahhh, once you get high commitment it is very likely you’ll get high performance.

This isn’t some mystical process. By deploying a leader in every locker approach your players are highly involved with an opportunity to become highly committed. Your challenge is to get them to willingly invest their minds and heart into the team leadership development process, building skills and competencies that lead to high performance. So, to wrap up this leadership bite here’s the formula once again: High Involvement + High Commitment = High Performance.


BORING is good when you want to be good

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BORING is good when you want to be good

Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs ( Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

 

My youngest daughter is a 14 year old aspiring athlete. Early on in her sport endeavors she’s demonstrated strength, grit, commitment, and some explosive athletic ability. I don’t know how accomplished she’ll become but she puts her all into her athletic participation. She loves it. Practices, games, tournaments, and training sessions are why she gets out of bed each day. Much of me agrees with her; like father, like daughter! She recently came home from an after-school strength training session with the qualified strength coaches we have at our school. I asked her how her session was. ‘Dad, it was boring. We do the same exercises every time.’

This made me smile. We have highly qualified and passionate strength coaches and an elite weight room so the workouts were not my concern. What my daughter was experiencing was the paradox that boring is good when you want to be good. We live in a day and age when we have almost no tolerance for boredom. If something becomes boring, we move on quickly. We can skip commercials, check a different social media network, communicate with whomever we want whenever we want, or scroll our phones while standing in lines.

We have almost completely purged boredom from our lives and that has consequences. One of those consequences is we have forgotten how many boring repetitions it requires to become proficient in a task or skill. Skill development in athletics is a great example, but it has many other applications like earning a degree, losing weight, or saving money for a big purchase. Getting good is boring!

As I worked through my doctorate, I would estimate that 75% of the things I was involved in were boring, but it would not have developed the understanding of content or process necessary to do what was required to finish the doctorate (write a dissertation) if I had not navigated a lot of boring. Boring is not bad if you want to be good at something.

There are a couple of ways to navigate boring while pursuing something good.

1. Check off the completion of tasks as you are working through boring phases. Jerry Seinfeld used to keep a calendar above his desk and cross off each day that he spent 30 minutes working on new jokes. His goal was to create as many unbroken rows of x’s on his calendar as he could. I’m sure writing jokes day in and day out go boring, but we don’t have the humor of Jerry Seinfeld without his tolerance for boring.

2. Develop practical reminders of where you are heading. Post it notes on mirrors, home screens on phones, and daily journals are all great ways to remind yourself of why you started on a boring path to something good.

3. Do boring with other people that are headed your same direction. I spent 3 years working towards a particular goal in strength training during my 30’s. There was a lot of boring days, hard lifts, and failed programs. I kept going many times because I was having a blast being miserable with the two guys I was training with. We did boring together and it was quite so boring.

Mother Theresa is quoted as saying, ‘be faithful in the little things because it is them that your strength lies.’ Boring is hard to tolerate when it comes to commercials and lines but that doesn’t mean that boring is bad. Boring is good when you want to be good. Ironically, when you remember that boring is required to be good, boring becomes exciting!

Keep on, keepin’ on, friends!

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teenage children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.


Leadership Lessons from John Wooden

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Leadership Lessons from John Wooden
Dr. Cory Dobbs, The Academy for Sport Leadership

It’s Been Decades Since “Coach” was on the Sidelines but His Commitment to Character is as Relevant as it Ever Was

March is known for its madness. A time when team greatness is revealed. March is also a time when the best baseball players in the world go back to work— fine-tuning the fundamentals of their game. College basketball’s greatest coach was a tour de force for principled leadership and success. Great teams and fundamentals are of vital importance no matter what your endeavor, no matter what time of year.

Do you need proof that leadership is not about style? The legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden suggests that leadership is influence derived from one’s character. For Wooden, the ideal leader is someone whose life and character motivate people to follow. The best kind of leadership derives its capacity from the force of example, not from the power of position or personality.

Much of what passes as leadership today is nothing more than manipulation of people by sticks and carrots—threats and rewards. That’s not effective leadership for the long-term. Authentic leadership seeks to motivate people from the inside, by an appeal to the head and the heart, not by use of command and coercion. Compliance seldom, if ever, leads to authentic commitment.

Wooden influenced players through his character which he displayed in everything he did, from the way he recruited student-athletes to the way he taught them to put their socks on.

For Wooden character is the essential element necessary for great leadership.

Steve Jamison, author of best-selling books on John Wooden and Bill Walsh, has spent the past fifteen years working with Wooden on various books on leadership. He teaches Wooden’s principles to business leaders at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

“The reason he resonates with people, relate to him is as a teacher, leader, coach, he was extraordinary and as a person he was even more extraordinary. That’s a tough combination,” Jamison said.

Jamison began working with Wooden to organize and distill his wisdom for coaches and leaders in any industry. At the time he couldn’t find a publisher because most thought Wooden was no longer relevant. As one publisher told him “Coach Wooden is a little dusty on the shelf.”

Character, however, is never a quality to be shelved. Coach Wooden, as Jamison said, “Didn’t seek players who were characters. He wanted players that had character. Character was something that he felt essential to being a good performer, a good leader. Much of the problems we see today we can lay at the foot of leaders that have little character.”

When You’re Through Learning, You’re Through
Coach Wooden practiced life-long learning—as you would expect from a great teacher. Jamison, a leadership expert and educator said, “A lot of leaders get to a position with a lot of authority and power, it’s very easy to become overconfident and arrogant and think you know it all. John Wooden never made that mistake. He was very secure in what he knew but he never stopped learning. Never stopped looking for answers.”

“How willing are you to learn?” Jamison asks. “That doesn’t mean just opening a book or taking a course but how willing are you to challenge your beliefs and the way you do things, examining ways to improve. How willing are you to entertain new ideas? Whatever your level of success, self evaluation is important.”

Jamison said Coach Wooden simply asks leaders “How can you improve if you don’t have the ability to analyze yourself?” Jamison backed up this declaration from Coach Wooden by offering a story that exemplifies his commitment to self-evaluation.


“In Wooden on Leadership, Jamison explained, “ he tells the story of getting to the 1962 semi-finals of the NCAA national championships where UCLA played Cincinnati, the defending nation champs. They lost in the last seconds. On the flight back his assistant coach Jerry Norman says to him ‘coach you know we got some guys coming in next year (Goodrich/Erickson). You know, maybe we should look at bringing in the full court press.’ John Wooden knew what it was, he’d tried it his first two years at UCLA.”

“Maybe it’s time to revisit the press, said Norman.” Wooden, secure in his self, listened to his assistant. The next year UCLA pressed full-court. And the rest, as they say is history.

Wooden on Teaching: The Little Things Make the Big Things Happen
“One of the great abilities John Wooden has and had was his ability to take a complicated issue, distill it, so that, as he said, that ‘little things make big things happen,” said Jamison.
“In my view, what it was that he did to teach leadership, and it’s not complicated, he behaved like a leader. He acted like a leader. The primary teaching tool he used was his own life as an example,” Jamison commented.

Coach Wooden was a proponent of the principle that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. According to Jamison, “John Wooden had an effusive way of letting players know he cared. His practices were ferociously intense. There wasn’t any slack in practice where you could hang out and shoot the baloney. He found time at the beginning when players were coming onto the court to take a moment, to pull someone aside as they were ambling over to the practice and ask about how things were going. ‘How’s your mother.’ ‘How’s that history class going.’ He did this to show his sincere care and concern for his players.”

 

Pyramid of Success
Coach Wooden’s primary teaching tool has been his leadership model as distilled in his Pyramid of Success. Jamison commenting on this influential model for effective living said, “His definition of success isn’t about big, it isn’t about power, fame, fortune, and prestige. For him the highest level, the highest standard of success is making that effort to become the best that you can become whether it is a coach, teacher, student, member of a team.”

Success, as Coach Wooden says, is the peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.